Some guy, sitting in a room

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

Bloomsbury, 432pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781526624284

reviewed by Mathis Clément

The last time George Saunders’ thoughts on writing and the writer’s life appeared on bookshelves, they came filtered through the oddball idiom of Aldo Cummings in ‘The Falls’, one of six stories that make up Pastoralia (2000). Aldo is walking along a riverbank, feeling pleased with himself. He thinks of himself, ludicrously, as a great writer; ludicrous because of the way he thinks:

To an interviewer in his head, Cummings said he felt the possible rain made the fine bright day even finer and brighter because of the possibility of its loss. The possibility of its ephemeral loss. The ephemeral loss of the day to the fleeting passages of time. Preening time. Preening, nascent time, the blackguard.

This is dire, but Aldo considers it ‘good stuff’ and is disappointed not to have paper on hand. Though his pomposity is comic, Aldo is a pathetic character, nearing forty, unemployed and still living with his mother. On his walk, Aldo overtakes Morse, a self-doubting family man with a dead-end job that involves ‘swearing at a photocopier’, without acknowledging him. Aldo feels proud at having snubbed him: Morse is ‘one of the league of oppressive oppressors who wouldn't know the lot of the struggling artist if the lot of the struggling artist came up with great and beleaguered dignity and bit him on the polyester ass.’

As readers, we see this assessment for what it is: a failure of imagination. Aldo is unable to see either himself, or the world and the people around him with the penetrative clarity the writer needs, the clarity Saunders exhibits in his portrayal of both men. His verbal talent may be satirical, but his attention is empathetic.

Empathy is also what he values as a reader. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is Saunders’ distillation of two decades teaching on the Creative Writing MFA at Syracuse University, specifically a class in the 19th-century Russian short story. Why choose this subject? Because, for Saunders, the Russians feel urgent: ‘they seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool.’ They wrote stories ‘in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.’ Throughout his seven essays on as many stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, it becomes clear what this means: these Russians are radical empaths, whose readers, thanks to their writerly skills, are likewise transformed.

The comforting, even hokey, confidence of this vision maps easily onto the New Sincerity predicted by David Foster Wallace in 1993, a movement of ‘anti-rebels’ who eschew ironic detachment and instead ‘treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions . . . with reverence and conviction.’ Beneath their wacky settings and parodic corporate-speak, Saunders’ own stories are driven by such untrendy concerns: financial insecurity, trauma, loneliness, the desire for love. Their frequent reliance on rescue scenarios underscores his old-fashioned humanism, his belief that most of us, if faced with a stranger at risk of death, injury or grave misfortune, would save them even at cost to ourselves. That’s what Morse, the ‘oppressive oppressor’, does when he risks his life for two girls in a canoe who are being swept downriver towards a waterfall. And while human decency has proven a stable foundation for Saunders to build an impressive body of work on, applied to a group of writers with very different outlooks, styles and temperaments, it calcifies into an assumption.

Take Gogol, whose surreal tales have more in common with Saunders’ style than those of the three realists who form the bulk of the new book. ‘The Nose’ — subject of the fifth chapter — delights in its nonsensical premise, never seeking to resolve the paradoxes and impossibilities that arise when a civil servant wakes up to discover his nose missing, coming across it later that same day exiting a carriage in the uniform of a state councillor. In the time between breakfast and lunch, the missing appendage has achieved a higher rank than its owner, one among many unexplained absurdities: how is a nose able to walk and speak? Does it have a face and mouth? A brain? Why, all of a sudden, is it the size of a man? It seems to me that Gogol is far more interested in upsetting the reader’s assumptions about what makes a piece of fiction coherent than he is in using it as a ‘vital moral-ethical tool’. For me, this concern doesn’t even earn a podium place in Gogol’s order of interests. The silver medal is won by verbal inventiveness, the majority of which (as Saunders admits) is lost in translation; the bronze, by satirising the stratified tsarist bureaucracy. We laugh at Kovalyov’s narcissism, his obsession with rank, his hapless attempts to recapture his nose. We do not laugh with him because he is not laughing. This is as it should be. Satire benefits more from caricature than from fully-rounded characters. Gogol’s masterpiece, Dead Souls, is unforgettable, but not because of the rich humanity of its protagonist. Chichikov is a mediocrity, referred to throughout the novel, in a parody of Homer’s epithets for his heroes, with the bathetic description ‘not overly fat, not overly thin’. Gogol’s impulse as an artist is comedic and his comedy is often cruel.

I may be giving the wrong impression of Saunders’ book. It is not literary criticism either in the academic or journalistic sense, and bears little resemblance to the collections of critical essays produced almost de rigeur by fiction writers at a zenith in their careers (see Martin Amis, J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith et al.). Saunders calls it a ‘workbook’, a practical guide for writers to improve their craft by closely examining how seven great stories are put together. It is complete with exercises and is for the most part minutely focussed on how to transform imposing A4 blankness into artful, convincing fiction.

One method emerges above the rest: revision. Saunders confesses to having no idea where a story will go when he starts writing. His daily challenge is to follow one sentence with another, gradually revealing the story’s world to himself while escalating its stakes, continuously revising what he has written ‘towards specificity’. He gives the following practical example of how this works by beginning with the sentence ‘Some guy is sitting in a room thinking nothing at all and this other guy walks in.’ By revising towards specificity, we arrive at a concrete scenario:

An angry white racist named Mel, who has cancer, is sitting in the examination room, thinking of how unfairly he’s been treated all his life, when his doctor, a slightly egotistical Pakistani American, Dr. Bukhari, walks in, bearing bad news for Mel but glowing, in spite of that, with happiness because he’s just won a major award.

Saunders’ emphasis on revision helpfully demystifies the craft. The examples he supplies (including bespoke fragments, as above, and examples from the creation of his own stories) illustrate how aspects of fiction ranging from plot (which he calls ‘meaningful action’) to character, to structure, can all be improved by mindful revision. Though he tends to hammer the same points, there is useful advice here for aspiring writers, who will also treasure the window he opens onto his own practice.

Saunders speaks insightfully for himself, but problems arise when he speaks for others. It is a dubious proposition that revision is the primary source of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol’s respective qualities, especially the kind of revision that begins with knowing nothing about what is to come. Although textual evidence suggests Tolstoy was an obsessive reviser — there are ten surviving drafts of the first part of Anna Karenina, whose published form contains eight parts, and the serialised version of War and Peace has a very different ending to the completed novel — he underlay revision with written plans, which, even in their earliest stages, contain a great deal of the completed novels. Anna Karenina began not with its famous opening sentence, but with bullet-points, in which Anna’s suicide, Karenin’s acceptance of his humiliation, Vronsky’s horse-race, and several other crucial episodes were already laid out. Chekhov, about whom the book is most astute and whose broad empathy best aligns with Saunders’, is the least served by the emphasis on revision. Having written over 600 stories and lived to just 42, while working as a doctor most of his adult life, Chekhov would not have had time to practice the meticulous revision that Saunders (62 years, 29 stories) attributes to him.

What Saunders is really doing in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is explaining how he would have worked if he had written these seven stories. He shines a light on them that we do not receive from most other forms of criticism or from the biographical afflatus of authors’ diaries, notebooks and drafts. Scholarly fastidiousness is not Saunders’ métier or his aim, and for many his inaccuracies will not impede the value of this book. I have a hunch that the writers who will find it most useful are those who write in a similar way: the non-planners, the revisers. They include Zadie Smith and Javier Marías — hardly shoddy company. But for the planners, for those who produce sheaves of notes and whose path is largely (if flickeringly) illuminated before they set out, many of the book’s suggested methods may well prove less useful. For them, a pinch of scholarly finickiness could have been just the ticket — if Saunders had stopped assuming that Tolstoy worked in the same way as him and actually examined his plans, he might have offered more to help other planners. I picture an alternative version of this book, in which Saunders is one writer among many, each offering commentary on the Russian with the most similar practice to their own. Mario Vargas Llosa (a planner) on Tolstoy: that would have been a treat to put alongside The Perpetual Orgy, his magisterial treatment of Madame Bovary.

With its deficiency of scholarship, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is sadly revealing of its own genesis: the Creative Writing MFA. In her essay ‘Get a Real Degree’, published in the London Review of Books in 2010, Elif Batuman mourns the absence of literary history from MFAs in favour of a relentless focus on crafting polished sentences. While graduates’ technique might ‘leave Stendhal in the dust, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read.’ Instead of immuring themselves in the ivory tower, Batuman argues that young writers should seek real-world experience, study the masterpieces of the Western tradition, gain an understanding of literary history beyond the 20th and 21st centuries, and become involved in the lives of their non-literary compatriots, else they risk producing anaemic, irrelevant work.

While the BA-MFA-teaching pipeline is firmly established, at least in the US, the fact of having an MFA does not preclude one from taking on board any of Batuman’s recommendations: Saunders himself worked for years as a geophysical engineer, including a stint in the oilfields of Sumatra and he mentions the importance of this experience in informing his work. Unfortunately he does not do the same for the Russians, who seem throughout the book to write outside time. There is little sense of how they transformed their experiences and their readings of the tradition into original fiction — of how Chekhov’s profession as a doctor brought him into contact with the rural peasantry, leading to his unvarnished exposure of their living conditions in the story ‘Peasants’; of how Tolstoy’s service in the Crimean War and his learning Greek in order to read Homer in the original allowed him to infuse the battle scenes in War and Peace and Hadji Murat with unprecedented accuracy.

Saunders’ methods are lent grandeur by the causal relation he draws between them and the ‘moral-ethical’ function of fiction: its unique, and uniquely transmittable, powers of empathy. Craft, by which he means ‘revising towards specificity’, allows the writer to transcend his own narrow ideas about the world, opening his story up to ‘“supra-personal wisdom” by technical means.’ I don’t disagree with this statement — as Milan Kundera, whom Saunders quotes approvingly, states: ‘great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.’ But I do think Saunders’ unerring focus on these stories as they proceed sentence by sentence, his lack of interest in other methods of making fiction ‘more intelligent’ than its author, and his elevation of empathy at the expense of other effects (verbal play, landscape, satire) that bring joy to this and many other readers, make A Swim in a Pond in the Rain incomplete as a workbook. The next George Saunders, the next Zadie Smith, the next Javier Marías will find a lot to help them. The next Gogol will be left lonely.

Mathis Clément is a writer based in London.